Launch Site is proud to announce that the new website for Sharp & Sharp Properties is live at sharpandsharp.us. Since 2017, owners Fernanda and Shane have been restoring historic homes and buildings across Peoria, Illinois and turning them into one-of-a-kind rental apartments. Now their website matches the character of their buildings, and it keeps up with their open units on its own.
When we sent Fernanda the first preview of the new site, she wrote back:
“The design is flawless and beautiful, exactly what I’d like to have.” — Fernanda, Sharp & Sharp Properties
History made home
Sharp & Sharp's buildings are not cookie-cutter apartments. There's a mansion on High Street, a stone "castle" on Roanoke, and a downtown warehouse turned into lofts. Each building has a story, so the new site gives each one its own page with photos, details and the neighborhood around it.
Renters can browse all fifteen buildings by neighborhood, from High Street and Roanoke–Randolph to the Warehouse District and around Peoria. A map shows where every building sits and can be filtered by neighborhood and by what's available right now.
Open units that update themselves
For a rental company, the most important thing on the website is what's available. Sharp & Sharp already lists its units in Buildium, the property management software they use every day, so we connected the two:
- Every hour, the site picks up the Buildium listings, with rent, deposit, move-in date and the Apply link.
- When a unit is rented and its listing comes down, it comes off the website too. No more renters calling about an apartment that's already gone.
- Every open unit links straight to its online application, so a renter can go from "that looks great" to applying in one click.
An admin portal built for the owners
Fernanda and Shane can update the site themselves from their own admin portal at sharpandsharp.us/admin. Buildings, photos, units, neighborhoods and testimonials can all be edited there, with drafts and an undo history, and no plugins to keep patched.
Questions sent from the contact form or from any property page go straight to their inbox and are also saved in the admin, along with the property the renter was looking at.
Much faster on phones
Most renters look for apartments on their phones, so speed matters. We measured the old site and the new one the same way with Google Lighthouse (three runs of each page, median results):
- Phone speed score: 52 → 75 on average, and the About and Contact pages now score in the 80s and 90s.
- Desktop speed score: 76 → 96.
- The home page now shows its main content in 4.3 seconds on a phone, down from 13.8.
- 74% less data per page on a phone, from 3.2 MB down to 0.8 MB.
- A perfect 100 for accessibility on every page we tested.
Nothing lost in the move
A new website shouldn't cost a business the search traffic it has already earned. Every page address from the old site now forwards to its new page, so saved links and the pages Google already knows keep working. Google Analytics carried over too, now counting Apply clicks, resident logins, calls and form messages, so the owners can see exactly what the site brings in. The site also shows their live Google reviews on the home page.
See it for yourself
Visit sharpandsharp.us to tour the buildings, or read more about the project on our Sharp & Sharp Properties case study.
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